Maude Saunders Newsletter
Week of December 9, 2019
At Maude Saunders, we are...
One School
One Team
with One Mission:
EXCELLENCE A+
Goals:
- Have a positive mindset each day toward students, parents, & staff.
- Build team efficacy through collaboration.
- Create a school culture reflecting excellence in ourselves and our students.
- Build cognitive capacity in our students through high expectations.
Mission & Vision:
To be a place where all students succeed and achieve to their maximum potential with a curriculum that is a dynamic response to each student's needs.
Vision:
Maude Saunders Elementary School will create and sustain a school climate that encourages student success.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT - Bonnie Ard
As we closed out our MSE Christmas Party, I reflected on how many years Ms. Bonnie has organized and made our parties so much fun with her wonderful sense of humor. Our Christmas Party is only one example of the many things Ms. Bonnie does for our school - this includes the many things that no-one knows about. I want to say thank you to Ms. Bonnie for everything you do for our MSE family! You are valued and what you do does not go unnoticed.
Thought for the Week
Differentiated Accountability: We are proudly educating 542 future leaders.
Preventing and Solving Discipline Problems - We will be exploring behavioral strategies each week, including how to deal with challenging students.
5 Components:
- Positive teacher-student relationships
- Clearly defined parameters of acceptable student behaviors
- Monitoring skills
- Consequences
- Strong content instruction
Let's continue to be consistent with our classroom procedures and school norms so we can continue to reduce referrals.
INSTRUCTIONAL FOCUS - Productive Struggle
Productive Struggle for All
December 13, 2018 | Volume 14 | Issue 11
Productive Struggle Is a Learner's Sweet Spot
Barbara R. Blackburn
Rigor is a buzzword in today's educational circles, but there are many misunderstandings about the concept. Although rigor means having high expectations for all students, those expectations must be accompanied by appropriate support. Student success occurs when you create an instructional environment that sets high expectations for each student and provides scaffolding without offering excessive help. The key is to incorporate productive struggle.
Productive struggle is what I call the "sweet spot" in between scaffolding and support. Rather than immediately helping students at the first sign of trouble, we should allow them to work through struggles independently before we offer assistance. That may sound counterintuitive, since many of us assume that helping students learn means protecting them from negative feelings of frustration. But for students to become independent learners, they must learn to persist in the face of challenge.
This does not mean you teach a standard lesson and allow students to struggle throughout. I recommend providing specific opportunities for productive struggle as students build their skills. For a struggle to qualify as productive, it should:
- Challenge the specific weaknesses of the student or small group rather than overwhelm them.
- Occur within challenging activities and assignments.
- Be productive rather than frustrating. For example, if you want to learn to play tennis, you will struggle appropriately playing a slightly superior coach who challenges you rather than playing someone completely out of your league.
- Let students use metacognitive reflections to process their thinking. With metacognitive reflections, students think about how they learn in addition to what they learn.
Productive struggle means more than simply giving a student "hard work" and leaving them alone to struggle. It is a learning opportunity that requires a teacher to create, facilitate, and monitor the process, especially as students are learning how to struggle productively.
For complete article see: http://www.ascd.org/ascd-express/vol14/num11/productive-struggle-is-a-learners-sweet-spot.aspx
Top 10 Achievement Boosters For Students ©2016 Eric Jensen
7. ENGAGEMENT
WHAT THIS MEANS: Engagement means different things to different people. The so-called “experts” are quick to point out that we want higher order engagement. But engagement happens on many levels. Here I introduce several levels and after each of them, there are suggestions on what to do and how to do it. Teachers who use high engagement and engage relentless affirming interactions with thoughtful error correction usually have high-performing students. Let’s introduce the WAYS that you can engage. All of them are good, just not all for the same situation.
HOW TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN: The first type of engagement I call “maintenance.” These engagements go by very quickly and are designed to “maintain mind-body states” for optimal learning. This 1st level consists of brief actions such as call responses, “turn tos” (“Turn to your neighbor and say, ‘Great effort’”), and physical acts like, “Slide your chair a foot forward” or “Clap twice and stomp your feet,” or teams do an energizer, or just stand and stretch. These keep students in behaviorally flexible states and promote curiosity, attention and blood flow. Without these, students may drop off into states of lethargy.
The second engagement is called “set-ups and buy-in.” Most of your activities or content blocks will work (or not) based on how well you prepare learners before you begin. Set-ups include “priming” for content, cueing with teasers, using buy-in strategies and invoking states of anticipation (e.g. “Oh! I’ve got a great idea; it’ll only take a second. Please stand up and take in a deep breath. Now, if you’re ready, next you’ll…”). These strategies are not much of anything EXCEPT they ensure the NEXT thing that you do WILL work. “Set-ups and buy-in” are priceless and without them, even good activities will die.
The third type of engagement is orchestrated to elicit a certain type of cognitive change. These would be activities such as whole class Q & A time, partners creating a quiz, discovery learning, group projects, completing a summary, discovering missing items, doing key research or skill-building. These are the most commonly cited forms of engagement. These are indeed powerful. But you can’t be doing these 100% of the time, so that’s why there are other types offered here.
Finally, for long-term change, you’ll want “Eudaimonic engagement” to give your students the joyful satisfaction that arises from pursuing long-term and worth-while goals. You get this when students cooperate to become a team, or they focus on learning a tough new skill, or building something relevant, or leading an interesting project. This can sustain students through long-haul learning and it fosters grit and resilience. This final type of engaged learning joy is associated with increased gray matter (Lewis, Kanai, Rees & Bates, 2013) and a lower inflammatory level and stronger antiviral response (Algoe & Fredrickson, 2011). Research shows it also helps kids stay healthy, avoid drug temptations and have greater resilience (Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels & Conway, 2009) plus it helps students choose healthier life pathways (Tong, Fredrickson, Chang & Lim, 2010). This engagement requires BIG goals, interdependency, feedback and relevant challenges with buy-in. You have to look
hard for this research, since it is all pretty new. But, it’s one of my favorite types of engagement and motivation is usually through the roof with life-changing dividends. You’ve been introduced to several ways to think of engagement. Your new mindset should be, “I can engage any student at any time, at any level, for any activity.” That’s the level of confidence you want. Over time, you’ll have collected or developed enough strategies to back up that confidence by working with some new levels of engagement. Some of the benefits may turn out to be invisible to the untrained eye. But you’ll know better.
From the desk of our own Krisy Spence
Each morning, as you walk through the safe lobby, you pass a calendar and display case on your left. This is our “parent center”, which we are required to provide for our parents, in an easily accessible area. The parent center includes newsletters, menus, assessment schedules, parent-teacher-student compacts, Florida Standards brochures, copies of our parent involvement policy, parent tip sheets, volunteer information, local agency information, and more. When you meet with parents, be sure to direct them to check out our Parent Center when they are at the school!
Important Information
- I am so Proud of YOU!!!!: We are in striking distance of our goal. Let's keep focusing on our Learning Gains and Learning Gains of our lowest quartile and we WILL achieve EXCELLENCE!!!!
- Individual Data Chats: Mr. Johnson and I will be scheduling Individual Data Chats in the next few weeks. I encourage you to go ahead and share your individual data with your grade levels and identify patterns and trends that can be addressed during your PLC. Please let Mr. Johnson and myself know how we can support you in this process.
- Individual Student Goal Setting: Please complete K-12 Lift Student Goal Sheets and make sure you document in your lesson plans.
- Final Evaluations: Let's begin our final evaluations in January. I want to have ALL evaluations complete by the end of April 2020 (before testing).
- Review Proposed Standards: In a Just Read, Florida! presentation yesterday, they boiled the most significant proposed changes in the new standards to the items listed below. Please review the standards and submit feedback through this link: https://www.floridastandardsreview.org/
- Skyward: Anyone that has submitted TDE into Skyward must upload an attachment (agenda, email requesting you attend, etc.). If you did not do this, please go back and upload your attachment. NOTE: You do NOT have to submit TDE into Skyward for trainings we have on our campus. This was just clarified at my Principals' Meeting. So for our Data Chats, you do NOT have to upload an attachment.
- Comp Time: Please do NOT enter comp time for Faculty Meetings. Loveta will enter Faculty Meeting Comp Time into Skyward for all that attend. If you leave early, make sure you write the time you leave by your name. Also, please remember that comp time must be pre-approved. For parent meetings, please upload an attachment to indicate the time-frame in which the conference was held.
- Lesson Plans: Please make sure your lesson plans are on your desk and accessible each day. I may need to refer to them when doing a walk-through.
- FOCUS: Please keep your grades updated and make sure your grades are standards-based and you have the correct number of grades per the SPP.
- Parent Communication: How are the positive phone calls home progressing?
- Safety: Please keep all classroom doors locked.
- Attendance: Attendance should be completed by 8:30 a.m.
- Transportation Notes: Please make sure these are sent to the front office no later than 8:30 a.m. Also, make sure transportation notes are picked up from your box before dismissal.
- Principals Meeting: I will be out on Thursday, 12/12/19. If you need me, text me or email me.
Calendar Additions:
NOTE: Please let Mrs. Bonnie know if you have events that need to be added to the master calendar. Ms. Bonnie will begin this week entering what we have on the master calendar so far.